


Farewell Casablanca

by mercurybard



Category: Push (2009)
Genre: Community: au_bingo, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-26
Updated: 2010-11-26
Packaged: 2017-10-13 09:28:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/135752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mercurybard/pseuds/mercurybard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What is a Watcher willing to give up to give her people a chance.  Written for my au_bingo card. Prompt-Alternate History: Someone was never born.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Farewell Casablanca

**Author's Note:**

> Push belongs to people who ain't me.

She's out of breath. The future has sucked it clean out of her. All she can do is clinging to the hotel room bureau with her fingernails as her eyes roll back in her head. Joseph is there, wrapping his arms around her waist, trying to haul her over to one of the neatly made beds, but she won't let go. If she just clings a little longer to the vision, if she can just hold on for a few more moments as it spins out to its conclusion...

So close, so close.

Then Joseph manages to pry her away; the two of them toppling sideways and bouncing on the cheap mattress, their feet tangling together. The future shifts just as violently to the left. She can feel his breath on her neck and then the phantom brush of lips. This is where the vision pulls away from reality like a sheet of contact paper pulling away from its backing.

His hand, calloused and rough with honest labor (she calls him 'Joseph' not because it's his name, but because he was a cabinet maker once, before Division caught up to him), gathers her unruly blond curls and moves them out of the way. His lips press more firmly to the cool flesh of her neck, along her spine. The arm not pinned under them drifts up from her waist, trailing along her side, reaching across to cup one of her breasts. They've been dancing around an adrenaline-fueled tension for weeks. It's...fun. In a way nothing else in her life is. She arches her back and tips her head to get at his mouth. The angle is bad, awkward, but it's the middle of the afternoon in a Holiday Inn in Des Moines, and she's fairly sure there's blood clotted into her hose from this morning's failed rescue of a renegade Sniff's wife from Division vengeance, and what could it be other than awkward?

Joseph Moves the zipper on her skirt with a quick wave of his hand, and she manages the buttons on her blouse, mostly, fingertips bloody with splinters from the dresser. Dull smudges of rust red on the white fabric, nowhere close to crisp now. She swivels in his arms then, feels one of the remaining buttons pop off when the shirt is twisted beneath her. It doesn't matter--she's never going to wear these once-respectable clothes again. The kisses are better from this angle, deep and biting, hungry and more than a little bit desperate. She undoes his fly, reaching into his underwear to jack him. She's not careful with her nails (not used to wearing acrylics, had them done this morning to go with the suit, has probably broken/will break half of them before they check out), and he hisses.

The future speeds up then, fast forwarding through a brief, heated coupling on a patterned hotel bedspread, through future self-imposed missions and faces that she's only seen in dreams. The little boy that she knows is Joseph's son (left behind in New Jersey with the ex-wife), huddled in fear. A vacuum cleaner running. A square-faced watch. The explosion and hurtling bodies that she's long known heralds Joseph's death. None of this is new...she's seen all of this before.

A man’s ring—simple gold band—spinning slowly on the shattered tile floor of a motel bathroom is original.

The little boy grown into a handsome man in need of a shave. Division men in gloves fondling his toothbrush, his mug, in a cramped Oriental apartment. They leave, the man leaves, and she glimpses his body, face-down in a foreign alleyway, tattooed with bruises not dealt by Division hands. That's new too.

The visions shifts, and she's in Morocco (a country she's never visited, but she knows it nonetheless), perched on a rock that's rapidly cooling as the sun sets in crimson smears. A dry desert wind whips the ends of her headscarf. She reaches under her loose shirt and runs a hand along her belly. Nothing. No caesarian scar. The daughter she's seen in so many visions never came in this future, and Joseph's boy is dead in a Hong Kong alley.

She's hiding in the desert, about to move up into the Atlas Mountains and further from Division's long reach, she knows with the omniscience that comes with visions and dreams. They are on the run, all of them, retreating to the hills and disappearing into the depths of the cities. They’ve lost. Failed. There will be no new generation to carry on the fight.

The warm touch of sun on her skin. Sand and rock and she breathes free with the memories of a man who loved (is loving) her. No scar on her belly. And knows that this failure will be all her fault.

In an impersonal Midwest chain hotel, she takes a shuddering breath and pulls away. A roll dumps her out of Joseph's embrace and onto unsteady stocking feet. She staggers back until she can feel the weird patterned texture of the wallpaper against the backs of her legs as she clutches her shirt closed in the front. "I...I can't. It goes all wrong."

He doesn't understand--she can tell from the look in his eyes--but how can she explain it to him?


End file.
